Republican file photoStas R. Radosz, executive director of the Polish Center for Discovery and Learning in Chicopee.
If there is any comfort to be hand in the aftermath of the airliner crash that killed Poland’s president and many of its top military, political and church leaders on Saturday, it is in the attention to the site where it happened.

“Polish people here are very much thinking about the tragedy and they are also thinking about the past and where it happened,” said Stas R. Radosz, former Slavic bibliographer at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and founder-director of the Polish Center for Discovery and Learning in Chicopee.

The 96 people aboard the aging Russian airliner died in dense fog in Katyn Woods, in the Smolensk region of western Russian, where 70 years ago Soviet forces murdered at least 20,000 Polish soldiers.

The massacre followed the Soviet invasion of Poland but for decades Moscow denied the government of Josef Stalin had ordered it and blamed the Nazis.

The late Massachusetts Gov. and U.S. Rep. Foster Furcolo was among those who sat on a congressional committee that deemed the Soviets responsible for the massacres, some 50 years before the Soviet news agency Tass in 1990, deemed it “one of the most horrifying of Stalinist crimes.”

Furcolo susbsequently wrote a book on it called, “Rendezvous at Katyn.”

Polish president Lech Kaczynski and his wife, Maria, whose uncle was among those killed at Katyn, were headed there along with some other 86 Polish citizens for a memorial service.

Radosz noted that many people who are not Polish have no knowledge of what happened at Katyn.

“Most Americans are unaware of what happened or have forgotten,” Radosz.

“The Soviets and Germans were allies at the start of World War II and Poland was caught between the two. The Germans were destroying the cultural leaders of Poland in the west and the Soviets were attempting to do the same in the east. Katyn was one of many tragedies that occurred and it shouldn’t be forgotten.”

Radosz said the Nazis uncovered the graves in 1941.

“No one could believe it. The number of dead was first put at 4,500 and then 15,000 and then 22,000,” Radosz said.

Radosz believes the intent behind the massacre was to ensure Poland would have no leaders to interfere with Soviet plans to subjugated the country after the war.

“The soldiers were taken from eastern Poland and put in camps in the Katyn forest. They Soviets then decided who had to be eliminated. They dug trenches, made the soldiers kneel and shot each in the back of the head. We know the exact date because some of the soldiers had written letters to their families and these were found in their pockets. Some of them were wearing watches that broke so we know the time from where the hands on the watch stand.” Radosz.

While Radosz said Moscow has started to somewhat acknowledged “in its own way” what happened at Katyn, he said media attention to the site of the airline accident is reminding the public of the atrocities that occurred under Stalin.

“The crash has helped gain more sympathy for what happened to Poland vis a vis the Russians. Stalin was a horrible despot on the same level of Hitler and that tends to get forgotten. He was responsible for the deaths of millions of people in the interests of political expediency,” Radosz said.

There will be a Mass in memory of those who died in the airline crash on Wednesday at 7 p.m. in the lower basilica of the Basilica of St. Stanislaus, Bishop & Martyr, in Chicopee.